Raul Mestre Takes Down IFP’s “The Table” World Championship

Sunday, November 20th, 2011 by Ryan

The International Federation of Poker kicked off its first World Championship in history, and the final table, or what they call “The Table” featured some exciting play from the word go. When all was said and done and it was down to two players, it was Raul Mestre from Spain, matched up against Victoria Coren from the United Kingdom for the first place finish and the grand prize. Play went on for eleven hours on Saturday, and it featured a starting field of 135 players who were eventually taken down to only nine final players, who made up the final table. This final table featured all types of players from around the world, and featured three women, Sandra Naujoks (Germany), Marsha Waggoner (Australia), and Coren. The first place prize for the first IFP World Championship was an impressive $250k payday, and would also give them the bragging rights to say that they were the first ever IFP Champion.

The final table action started off with players from many different countries including Mestre (426k) from Spain, Igor Trafane (369k) from Brazil, Sandra Naujoks (167k) and Tim Reese (44k) from Germany, Takuo Serita (41k) and Kinichi Nakata (29k) from Japan, Coren (204k) from the UK, Slavko Tomic (44k) from Serbia, and Waggoner (32k) from Australia. As you can see from those chip stacks starting the final table, there was a wide range of starting stacks, and two of our bigger stacks were the ones who found themselves alive at the end of the day.

To kick off the final table action, each of the remaining players was given a prize for their efforts, in the form of a watch from Perrelet. This company is the sponsor of the event, and gave them a Perrelet Turbine watch. It’s a pretty nice prize for any of them, especially due to the fact that it has a value of around £4500.

The action started off fast, as Coren eliminated Nakata and Reese within the first hour of play, and just kept climbing the leaderboard throughout the day. The action saw Serita and Naujoks eliminated in seventh and sixth places, respectively. The two players who eventually made it to heads up play in Coren and Mestre then made two big knock outs when Coren sent Waggoner home in fifth, and Mestre sent Tomic home in fourth place. This left three players remaining, with Mestre holding 732k chips, Trafane holding 486k chips, and Coren holding 134k chips. Three handed play went on for three hours before the elimination finally came.

The biggest hand came when both Coren and Trafane got it all in with A-Q, but Coren have spades. The flop fell with all spades, and left Trafane crippled with only 14k in chips. Trafane was then knocked out by Mestre on the very next hand, which set up the match between Coren and Mestre.

Mestre started off strong, but Coren waited for her spots and eventually grabbed the chip lead from him. The two went back and forth for a good while, before Mestre pushed all in, with Coren calling. Mestre turned over pocket fives and was up against the A-J of Coren. Mestre held up though, and held a chip lead of 1.17 million to 180k. Coren put up a good fight to make the comeback, but Mestre eventually took it down when he had his A-5 up against the A-3 of Coren. Mestre won it all, and took home the $250k prize, while his opponent Coren got a nice consolation prize of $100k.